Korczak with Agnieszka Holland

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Holland’s “angry and urgent masterpiece” (The Guardian) centers around the 2021 migrant crisis that unfolded in the exclusion zone between Poland and Belarus. Named for the swamplands that cover the region, Holland’s impactful narrative was conceived by reflecting on actual events, using interviews with real border guards and refugees to inform the four interwoven stories that supply the work with its incredible emotional depth. Made with trusted collaborators, including cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk and co-writer Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, Green Border insists on depicting regional upheaval and conflict by prioritizing its human impact.

Based on the life of German-speaking Jewish-Czech modernist author Franz Kafka, who died in 1924 at 40 after publishing three novels and a handful of short stories and parables, Franz was a natural story for Holland to adapt into a film: she read his famous Metamorphosis when she was 14 and felt “since that time, Kafka is my brother” (Screen Daily). Wanting to give the character “light—and some punk infusion,” Holland takes a playful approach to the author’s idiosyncratic personality through “some kind of biography” that she hopes appeals to young people who might not be familiar with this man who has been written about far more voluminously than he was able to write for himself.

Inspired by the memoirs of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who evaded Nazi persecution by joining their ranks, Holland’s WWII–era biopic offers " new immediacy to the outrage by locating specific, wrenching details that transcend cliché" (New York Times). Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 64th Oscars—the film was shut out of the then-named Foreign Language Film category when Germany refused to nominate it for its thematic content—Holland’s complicated work investigates ways that denial and untruths can lead to irrepressible personal, generational, and cultural anguish.